Ideally, books should enhance knowledge, challenge perspectives, and engage the reader. In many respects, Choreographic Dwellings: Practicing Place, edited by choreographer/scholars Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge, succeeds in challenging and engaging the reader with a heterogeneous collection of thought-provoking essays by authors from a variety of disciplines and regions. More generally, the volume raises questions about some of the crucial theoretical shifts that are occurring in dance studies. There is a consistent and creative effort to modify and expand the current performance studies’ lexica, even if at times the push for innovation remains at a linguistic more than a conceptual level. The choice of dwellingsFootnote ¹ in the title as the operative subject, in its double meaning of inhabiting and reflecting upon, immediately emphasizes the focus of the volume, clarified by the subtitle: Practicing Place. Choreographic assumes the role of the attributive adjective.

The editors use the first two chapters to articulate their, at times serpentine, “choreographic thinking” (2), creating a theoretical landscape that allows the reader to understand the experimental works in the anthology, better described as “movement environments or ecosystems, installations or dispositifs” (1). The aim of the editors is to challenge more conventional notions of choreography.

A number of contemporary choreographers engaged in analyzing and theorizing their own work seem to be stepping away from the concept of choreography, almost afraid to be associated with it, and certainly afraid to indicate that they are in an exclusive relationship with it. If at the emergence of dance studies, practitioners and writers turned choreography into the gerundive noun “choreographing” to convey more literally the powerful agency that dance as an art form has to create, read, understand, change the world, and theorize about dance making, by corporeally, consciously and historically inhabiting it,Footnote ² what does the turn of choreography into an adjective—choreographic—really mean? Is it becoming a linguistic habituation, an omnipresent neologism that locates choreography virtually everywhere—and therefore no longer anywhere?

In many theoretical projects and practices where the “choreographic” is proposed as an alternative to conventional notions of choreography, I often feel a need to understand better what the conventional notions of choreography are that many seem to want to distance themselves from. Those “conventional notions” in Choreographic Dwellings are often nebulous or oversimplified when applied to the dance sphere, where choreography seems to be associated with techniques, styles, or solely concerned with “the transformation, manipulation and elaboration of the movement possibilities afforded by the human body” (2).

In explaining the criteria by which they selected the essays, Schiller and Rubidge clarify that choreographic events in their anthology are not limited to the dance domain. Therefore the concept of choreography involves a migration of dance from strictly theatrical settings to “its manifestation as an immersion in the architecture of the everyday” (2).

We have been familiar with the migration of performances from conventional theater venues to alternative city spaces in New York since the 1960s, when experimental works occurred on the streets, in parking lots, and on the roofs, in addition to art galleries and museums. In more recent decades, the number of site-specific performances has exponentially increased, so the theoretical reading of events has become more elaborated as well. If Henri Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1991) freed the idea of space from a pure geometric denotation by populating it with social and political signifiers and actions even in its most abstract representations, in the 1990s specifically in relationship to dance, space became the elected place to elaborate and negotiate issues regarding identity, gender, and race.

The choreographic, in the editors’ terms, is a relational process that connects performers, participants, and space, “materializing new inhabited corporealities” (3). The choreographic's challenge to more traditional notions of choreography arises not only from the location and the way in which a choreographic work is presented, but also from how place is often redesigned and reconceived by experiential artworks, which in turn influences how the public reacts and interacts with them. “Choreographic dwellings” are better defined as the kinesthetic agencies that permeate the place where choreographic actions and the public meet.

The “relational” has been part of a more global—in terms of border-less geographies and blurred disciplinary boundaries—reconfiguration of the role of the artist for the last few decades. In what Claire Bishop has called “participatory art,” the artist is more of a “collaborator and producer of situations” than an individual who creates defined objects to be viewed. With works of art structured as long-term projects, the role of the audience necessarily changes: “previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder,’ the audience is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant” (Bishop 2014, 2).

The major influences mentioned in Choreographic Dwellings are from architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi, philosopher of place Edward Casey, and philosopher of perception Alva Noë. In general the editors adopt and readapt theories from geographers, architects, and neuroscientists who have assigned a central role to the body in experiencing the world in order to articulate how “place becomes action” through “platial efforts—those physical actions that result from the weaving of the choreographic dwellings with qualitative movement and place” (11).

Although Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a major influence on Casey and Noë, is not named in the bibliography, phenomenology is consistently present in the book, mediated through architectural theories of place and philosophy of perception. Tschumi's insistence on the complexity of the architectural experience, always located in the gap between ideal space (the product of mental processes) and real space (the product of social praxis) (Tschumi Reference Tschumi1994, 32), and his reluctance to consider architecture an autonomous art that relies exclusively on pure form, or style, reducible to a language (Tschumi Reference Tschumi1994, 3), has been further developed in recent years by a more defined movement in the phenomenology of architecture. Juhani Pallasmaa, in his The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses (Reference Pallasmaa2013),Footnote ³ which is now required reading in architecture courses, centers the body as the “locus of perception” in the architectural experience. By proposing a shift from an ocular-centric perspective that valorizes forms and assumes sight to be the guiding sense, he has been advocating for a more sensuous and tactile approach to architecture and space, in order to “reinforce our capacity for empathy, compassion, and participation with the world” (2013, 22). In an editors’ note, Schiller and Rubidge add that the environmentally focused choreographic works of Anna Halprin, the Judson Dance Theater group, and the UK artist Mike Pearson were inspirational for having emphasized with their different practices how “choreography is not only to be seen but to be experienced” (20).

The nine chapters in the book, each briefly introduced by the editors, and all worth reading, explore “choreographic dwellings” in different settings and cultural contexts, and with different theoretical approaches and writing strategies. Some of the essays are written as autobiographical accounts of site-specific performances. In these the performer/writer attempts to transfer elements of the event onto the page using experimental writing strategies. Other chapters are structured more conventionally, their cases theoretically framed with ethnographic, historical perspectives.

As an example of the former category, in Chapter 3, “Enduring Gravity: Footnotes of Walking and Duration,” performer Misha Myers strives to transfer her walking projects, described as “both a mechanism of performance and a methodology of research” (30), onto the page. The concept of lentosphere—“more fluid than spherical, not a place but the emergence of multiple pathways” (33)—is proposed as an alternative to Virilio's dromosphere. Myers's performative acts of rebellion toward speed in contemporary culture are manifested by walking slowly, and meditating on gravity and duration. Footnotes become the metaphor for digressional detours that interrupt linearity, inducing a slow, often unfocused reading.

A different writing strategy is adopted by performer Helen Paris in Chapter 6, “Still. Moving.” The evocative description of her project, Out of the Water (2012), in collaboration with artist Caroline Wright, composer Jocelyn Pook, and soprano Laura Wright on the shore of Norfolk, invites the reader to imagine the site-specific event in its rhythmic interaction with waves, immersed in the architectural openness of the beach, constantly transformed by the tides, and the audience's participation. The event is brought to the page by alternating descriptions of rehearsal and preparation, with vertical verses that seem to visualize the line of performers on the shore, and to recreate the rhythmic presence of the participants, as well as the waves in the background. The memoir-like essay ends with afterthought impressions of the physical experience, and the triggered memories of both an audience member and a performer.

In Chapter 9, “The Body Library: Chor(e)ographic Approaches to Movement, Memory, and Place,” Gretchen Schiller bridges the two different writing styles. She first introduces the reader to her performance, Falling Place (2012), a “choreographic mise-en-scène of movement, words, images, and textures embedded in a library-like scenography” (142). Here a fictional librarian guides audience members, one-by-one, into a metaphorical body-library. Subsequently a more extensive section of the chapter traces back the research for the Body Library project, where Schiller questions whether memories, gestures, and sense of place can, once archived in our body, be easily indexed and retrieved. Echoing Bergson, she questions whether “habitual memory, also known as procedural memory, cultivates physical repetition and reiteration” (144). The author engages the reader through a multifocal lens informed by ongoing theoretical debates in biology, geography, and performance studies.

What most of the projects in the anthology have in common is long-term durability, the uniqueness of the event that may not be repeatable under the same circumstances, and remarkable transformations that occur through displacement. In Chapter 8, “Chula in the City: Traditions, Translations and the Tactics in Brazilian Samba de Roda,” Danielle Robinson and Jeff Packman trace the transformation that occurs, for instance, to samba de roda, when traveling from its original rural setting to an urban one, where it is impacted by tourists’ expectations. They record how new strategies had to be activated by the performers in order to preserve samba de roda's identity while still creatively transforming its practice to satisfy and maintain an experiential conversation with the new interlocutors, the tourists, who may be more or less familiar with samba de roda.

When traditional stage borders are dissolved, locating the physical limits and extensions of site-specific events in open environments is more difficult. Luc Boucris, in Chapter 7, “Territoires, Fraying at the Edges,” analyzes the works of French artists Christine Quoiraud, Mathurin Bolze, and Christopher Halebaware, by activating a set of principles— “visibility, sense making, and value”—in order to identify what constitutes a “scenic experience” in spite of the porous borders of the “open art gallery” (97). He analyzes the concept of territoire—the constantly shifting space where a performance is manifested—focusing on the role assigned by the artists to the audience, and how each artist negotiates that relationship differently. Boucris transcends the simple dichotomy of passive vs. active spectatorship by introducing the idea of a “metaphorised, dramatized and hyperbolized spectator” (108–109).

In Chapter 4, “Corpographia: A Processual Concept of the Urban Body,” dance researcher Fabiana Dultra Britto and architect-urbanist Paola Berenstein Jacques, in their theorization of corpographia, on the one hand, respond more clearly to some of the requisites for “choreographic dwellings” elaborated by the editors, and on the other hand problematize some of those aspects, leaving debates open for discussion and further reflection.

Their Corpocidade Platform is a long-term interdisciplinary project initially motivated by a common preoccupation of the authors: the deterioration of the public sphere. First organized in Salvador, Brazil, in 2007, it later migrated to Weiman, Germany, and then to Paris, France. The project's focus is on the relationship of body-city, called corpographia, and described by the authors as “a process that can subvert the logic of city-as-spectacle that currently permeates the contemporary urban planning that has emerged from the capitalistic system” (46).

As often occurs in projects of participatory art, the political target is capitalism or one of its many direct consequences, in this case urban degradation. The first Corpocidade Platform involved scholars from dance to urban planning, and from architecture to psychology, as well as artists from a variety of backgrounds. Their initial idea was to create a conversation between two bodies of knowledge—choreography and cartography in the broadest sense—and let them converge in the experience of the city by and through the body. The participants’ intention was not “to rely on representation to become visible,” describing urban corpographia as “a manifestation of corporeality” (48). The invited artists performed urban interventions that addressed the relationship between private and public space. In addition, other workshops were organized in low-income neighborhoods of Salvador to collect what they call cartografias sensorais (50), cartographies that represent the spatial distribution of the sensorial experiences of the body.

If the Corpocidade Platform as an ongoing project aims to create a “transitive zone” of shared knowledge and common actions based on cooperation between academic fields, corpographia becomes the “unstable ‘scripting’ of the city experience that shapes the bodies of those who experience it” (47). As the organizers and its participants are challenging the concept of cartography by relocating mapping strategies from the city onto bodies, they are also challenging the notion of choreography, although not in a particularly innovative way, by situating a set of improvised movements in urban environments, without compositional structures or predictable outcomes that they are calling “choreographic situations” (53).

In their analysis, Dultra Britto and Berenstein Jacques introduce the concept of procedural logic (being corpographia, a self-organized system that involves relational processes) vs. configurative logic that uses linear associations generally adopted in current historiographical interpretations and critiques of culture and art. The platform focuses mostly on the relationship between the ordinary lived body and the city in order to reveal alternative pathways to the currently hegemonic process of the spectacularization of modern cities, echoing Richard Sennett (1997) as one of the few to point out that “not only studies of the body influence urban studies, but that the body and the city are mutually configured” (58).Footnote ⁴

In contrast to other forms of participatory art mentioned in the volume, the Corpocidade Platform more clearly articulates the idea of experience as a guiding principle of methodological investigations. In the participants’ consistent shift between theories and practices, they try to keep the tension between artistic and social critique active, avoiding turning the city into an image of commodity, proposing bodily experiences as a “micro-detour from the logic of city-as-spectacle” (64). At least as a goal, they continue to question and to keep the Corpocidade Platform in a state of instability, not only by moving the platform to other locations, but also by changing the structure and the canonical order in which conferences and panels are organized, trying to reinvent it, “testing organizational and dynamic working formats capable of establishing the desires and structuring expectations of a genuinely political public life on different fronts of public actions” (64).

The debate on the choreographic remains engaging and relevant in Choreographic Dwellings by keeping “place” as an attentive and transformative interlocutor of choreographic practices. In general, the volume confirms the recent shift in the analytic tools adopted to articulate discourses on movement-based art forms. Where in the past decades feminist, queer, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theories were the ruling instruments, now a more phenomenological approach, influenced by neuroscience and philosophy of perception, seems to be the most favored method of analysis, which may be symptomatic of our historical moment.

Sally Ann Ness, in her critical reading of Foucault's turn away from his initial phenomenological approach, accurately pointed out how a historically oriented research agenda alone can compromise and narrow the disciplinary perspective of the dancing and choreographing subjects (Reference Ness2011, 23) offering only a partial standpoint. I agree with Ness, as I believe that the risk of a solely phenomenological approach that focuses on the experiential aspect of the performance risks locating events in an historical vacuum. Certainly that provides only a partial alterative to archeological investigations.